Recommendation: Base investment decisions on data and performance

In an era of constrained resources, the State of Illinois and local governments need to ensure that investments in infrastructure and public services are based on their performance relative to established goals and targets, rather than on arbitrarily derived formulas. Since the passage of Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21), the federal government has also emphasized the importance of data-driven investment in transportation infrastructure. A performance-based approach has broader applications, such as for evaluating services to ensure that investments are in line with priorities. Yet agencies integrating performance-based processes may not always have data available to fully implement them. Specifically with regard to transportation, CMAP and the state can provide a variety of funding and technical resources to help local governments implement pavement management systems.

Having access to rich data about the region and its residents was a critical part of ON TO 2050 development. CMAP, its partners, and many other public and private entities use data from the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as other federal agencies that collect and analyze demographic and socioeconomic data, to analyze strategies and policies that drive planning and investment activities. The federal government should ensure that its data collecting agencies are equipped with adequate resources and administrative capacity. Those federal agencies should continue to modernize their activities to provide access that is timely, thorough, and secure.

When properly collected and analyzed, high quality health data and metrics are important for reducing health inequities. One of the most regularly collected sources of primary health information across counties is the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey. The Illinois Department of Public Health administers the survey every two years and data is available at county level geographies. For a fee, local health departments can contract with the Illinois Department of Public Health to conduct a local version of the BRFSS or oversample at the community level. Oversampling this data allows more specific health data tracking in an effort to highlight and address health inequity among population groups. While such primary health data is valuable, so too are broadly agreed-upon indicators. Health partners in the region currently do not have a common health equity indicator. Ideally, such an indicator would be broken down by race/ethnicity, class, gender, and disability. Finally, local governments need help understanding how their policies and practices relate back to the identified health equity data and a regional indicator and monitoring the success of changes.

Improved asset condition data can aid state and local governments’ long-term financial planning. Local governments have an unmet need in the region for greater familiarity with financial management policies and land use choices that take a long-term perspective for improving resilience to difficult economic periods. A broad range of actors, including CMAP and its partners, can help build local expertise on recommended measures through materials and trainings. Partnerships with civic and professional organizations could be leveraged to develop trainings that build familiarity with best practices and assist with local application.

Proper evaluation of any program relies on two essential components: clear, relevant, ascertainable data, and internal procedures to assess outcomes and make decisions. The transparency of data and information on economic development incentives varies across metropolitan Chicago. Public agencies collect and publish a significant amount of non-proprietary information regarding incentives, but these data systems are often inadequate to determine an investment’s effectiveness. In particular, disclosure standards can differ by the unit of government and the type of incentive, leaving information too fragmented or inconsistent to determine the total incentives going to a project. Regularly evaluating and publishing incentive data allows communities to make prioritized investments in their economic growth and long-term sustainability. Rather than extending incentives into perpetuity, the State of Illinois and local governments should pursue performance-based approaches to make decisions that extend, improve, or terminate incentives based on rigorous analysis. Such analysis should account for the incentive’s full costs and benefits, progress in achieving its public purpose, and trade-offs relative to other government activities. This strategy also appears in the Governance chapter, under the recommendation to Base investment decisions on data and performance.

To make sound decisions, the region’s transportation agencies require data from all elements of the network, whether public or private. This is especially important to better understand non-motorized, freight, and TNC travel, each of which has been difficult to measure and analyze due to inadequate data. More frequent and detailed data on pedestrian and cyclist behavior could become available as sensing technology is increasingly deployed in public rights of way, and as private and public agencies analyze aggregated data from mobile devices and activity tracking apps. This might enable more efficient and accurate counts of cyclists and pedestrians as well as more complete inventories of the infrastructure they use. The region has greatly advanced its understanding of truck travel through the use of new data sources and monitoring systems, but similar information on rail movements — particularly private systems — is limited.

To understand rail performance, CMAP has made progress in collecting new data in recent years, but this data is aggregated to a high level that does not allow evaluation of potential rail projects. For tax dollars to be invested in private projects, private rail operators must demonstrate sufficient public benefits. Only with appropriate data from the freight rail industry — including speeds, volumes, and reliability of freight trains along specific corridors and at key rail-rail crossings — can this all-important analysis be conducted. Existing and emerging private providers have broad impacts on the transportation network, including impacts on congestion, mobility for people with disabilities, and transit ridership. Local governments and public transit agencies should work with TNCs and other private transportation providers to obtain the data necessary to understand these impacts and make sound policy and investment decisions. With full respect for the right of private companies for their sensitive data to be kept secure, public decision makers have the obligation to assess whether limited taxpayer dollars are being invested wisely and to examine the public benefits and costs of these services’ use of the public right of way. With a long record of safeguarding similarly sensitive data, CMAP will continue to play a major role in aggregating, normalizing, and sharing data as appropriate with regional stakeholders.

Public agencies also need to invest in their own data analysis, storage, and sharing capabilities. Such agencies, particularly lower capacity ones, might have difficulty collecting and managing transportation data as it increases in volume and complexity. Commercial services are increasingly essential for data collection, analysis, and visualization, reducing public agencies’ dependence on in-house expertise and potentially reducing costs, yet increasing their dependency on third-party tools and data providers. Public agencies should have the right to use, retain, and — when appropriate — share data collected by private sector sources on the behalf of public agencies or as a result of a public-private partnership. In turn, the public sector has its own valuable datasets, including system performance, conditions, and incidents. The public sector must carefully navigate competing mandates to provide open access to government data and protect the privacy of residents. This strategy also appears in the Governance chapter under the recommendation to Base investment decisions on data and performance.